6. The Imbalanced Board: Google

The phenomenon of missing key voices on boards is widespread and links directly to a lack of diversity, not just of ethnicity, gender and so on, but also background and lived experience. The inability of boards to listen to voices from outside the boardroom and the corporate-suite means that boards often overlook evidence of everything from widespread fraud to sexual harassment and abuse going on almost under their noses. The sexual misconduct scandals at Google are a case in point. Starting in 2017, the US Department of Labor, as part of an ongoing investigation, asserted that tech giant Google was engaged in ‘systematic compensation disparities against women pretty much across the entire workforce.’ This escalated in early 2018 to a class action discrimination action was brought against Google by women engineers, managers, salespeople and early childhood educators.